I've been on a bit of a home automation kick lately. Mostly just dabbling, trying to keep things on the cheap, semi-aimed at increasing efficiency.
First off, in the name of efficiency, I replaced of the most commonly used bulbs in my house with Cree brand LEDs from Home Depot. I made a nifty spreadsheet weighing hours used per day, wattage, etc and figure I should save a solid $20 per month with about a $300 investment. These things are supposed to last 20 years, so if they hold up like some of the other LED bulbs I have, I will be happy. I got the soft-white version and they are nearly identical to the incandescent bulbs that I replaced them with.
Next up, I installed a 'smarter' thermostat. I had a cheaper unit that I could not get the schedule to work to save my life, so I grabbed a Nest on black friday. Instead of putting it in the corner next to a window where the current thermostat is, I got some 18/5 cable, cut a few holes (PITA in this old house, bleh) and mounted it right in the center of the entire living space.
This thing is awesome, it has a motion sensor on it and does auto-scheduling and auto-away, and I can check the status or change things on it from anywhere, anytime.
Next up I grabbed a few of the Belkin WeMo light switches. These things are nice for an out-of-the-box product. I ordered from amazon but you can get them at BestBuy now as well! Basically I wanted to setup a schedule so lights were on/off surrounding my normal schedule, and some random on/offs for semi-theft deterrent.
Next piece to the puzzle is garage monitoring. I wanted a way I could open/close the garage remotely and get notified if it gets left open. I decided to do a little home-brew action with a raspberry pi. I followed
this guy's tutorial & codebase and have been modifying it to add features.
Setup for testing on my ottoman:
Mag switch installed:
Temporary wiring install for initial testing. I think I bumped some other cabling though when I was installing, because my existing garage door openers don't seem to work as well as they used to, only from about 5-10' away, not outside the garage.
I added a rpi camera module & setup the dashboard so it would display a static image that is updated every 5 seconds, and then I wrote some scripts that will email & txt me in case the door gets left open for too long. Lots of refinement to do here, but I can access the unit remotely and it works absolutely perfect thus far.
'Access Door' is the human-sized door with a handle on it, I will be running a mag sensor to it as well but for now the pin that would connect to it is just simply unhooked (thus it shows 'Open').
And yes, I will be cleaning up the wiring and mounting, just wanted to get things rolling with it
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